Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Big Ag

It's companies you never heard of and names you see in your house every day. There are somewhere between 50 million and 100 million farms in the world (if you exclude those smaller than about three American football fields). But about half the crops produced by those farms rely on the seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides supplied by a mere dozen or so companies. Most of those crops are bought, traded, and transported around the world by another half dozen. Yes: Something like half of the crops on this planet are grown, processed, and shipped by fewer than two dozen companies. And when it's time for agricultural products to be processed and distributed to stores, that's another dozen or so, many overlapping with the aforementioned traders and suppliers.